Panama City

busses in central america are really rad. they must get old yellow school busses from the US and then totally pimp them out. the tourists here call them "chicken busses" because you can see people carrying chickens on them. the paint jobs are totally wild. a lot of them have sort of fantasy scenes painted on them like bikini girls hanging out in glaciers with polar bears. some of them have new england farm house scenes painted on them, which in central america must seem equally exotic. this is a photo of one of the chicken busses mud flaps. check out the sweet bikini babes on this bad boy. the driver thought it was so cool that we were taking photos of his bus.
i think we went the wrong way through costa rica and missed a lot of cool stuff because we took the coast instead of the mountain route. the coast was flat, but it seemed like one giant american retirement community with huge gated communities everywhere. we met this german cyclist who said the coast was beautiful, but that there was 40 km of dirt road, but that is was "fine". this was the worst dirt road ever. it was like riding through mud for hours. i think we were only going 3 mph. everything was bouncing around, and a screw snapped in half on peter's rack. my bike got so muddy, that my drive train would just totally freeze up and i couldn't pedal forward. in a couple days erik flies home to vermont, but clyde has recoverd from dengue and flew into panama yesterday, so now we are a group of three again, minus erik plus clyde. hope everyone had a really nice thanksgiving. love,
-jessie

i think costa rica will end up winning the award for crappiest roads overall. which is funny, becauase costa rica is the richest of all the central american countries. this is a photo of a bridge on a major highway. trafic can only go one direction at a time, so all the cars who are going the other way just have to wait for a while. this is a picture of where we-re staying tonight. very glamorous. today we met a japanese cyclist who has been biking for over a year and almost always camps. so in a way, this is high living.
costa rica is total "gringolandia". in a way it's nice because no one is yelling "gringo" at us anymore, but prices are also higher. a huge percentage of the country is protected as a biological reserve, which is pretty cool. erik's map says that costa rica is home to more bird species that all of north america combined. we haven't seen that many birds, but yesterday we saw a whole monkey family swinging through the trees. it was so awesome. i think i'm really into monkies. there was a dad, and a mom, and two babies, and sometimes the babies would ride on the mom's back. i tried taking pictures, but none of them came out that well. love,
-jessie

Liberia

so we are in costa rica right now, but this is a picture of this island we hung out in yesterday. it is a volcano in the middle of lake nicaragua. pretty cool, huh? the tourist brouchers boast that it is the world-s only freshwater lake with two volcanoes in the middle. this is a picture of the bigger one. we took this ferry out to the island, and they totally walked our bikes onto the boat on this plank of wood. i kept thinking, "what if my bike falls in the lake...." but they were totally pros at walking the plank. lake nicaragua is huge. i think at one point FDR wanted to put the canal there, but it ended up in panama instead. appearently there was some kind of celebration on the island, and we ended up in the back of this pick up truck on the way to see a rodeo. it was a pretty ghetto rodeo, but i thought it was super cool anyways cuz i-ve never seen a rodeo before. the bulls weren-t particularly tough, and the guys just stayed on until the bull stopped bucking around, and then they-d hope off. all the young macho guys would crawl underneath the chainlink fence, and then when the riderless bull came charging around they-d climb up to the top so that the bull didn-t crush them. also, everyone in the "ring" was drinking tons of beer. some of the bulls were cows, and the anouncer called them, "vaca ferocisima", which means totally ferocious cow. we-ve passed a lot of cows on this trip, but i-m not sure i-d catagorize any of them as totally ferocious.
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the americas, and when we crossed the border from honduras to nicaragua, this is what the road looked like. then the next day it rained, and it got even worse. this is a picture of erik avoideding potholes near a semi. the road was so bad that we were going faster than the semi trucks. after a while, the road surface got better. this computer loads photos really well, so i-m just going to post some more.

Leon

so we crossed over into honduras for a day, and now we are in nicaragua. lately it feels like we are just biking through the middle of nowhere. there is nothing out here. i don't recognize the plants, even the vultures look different. today it poured, and poured, and poured, and i remember staring at this dead dog laying in a puddle of water, and an old man careening around the road on this make shift bicyle and just thinking how insane all of this is.
i think there must be less and less tourists in these parts of central america because all day long we hear chants of "gringo! gringo! gringo!" a lot of the houses are made out of mud, and there will be kids in the yard watching the road and as soon as they see us, they start up with the "gringo" chant. i can't tell if it's derogetory or not. yesterday erik, peter and i stopped at this gas station and all these people were just staring so hard at us. i kept making jokes that we should start taking off all of our clothes to see if it would make them blink. oh my god, i'm in this in internet cafe, and they're playing that song that goes, "if you go to san francisco, be sure to put a flower in your hair." i'm not going back to san francisco for a long time.
once we get to panama city, erik is going to go back to vermont. i think he and his girlfriend miss each other a lot, and he is running out of money and getting tired. also, we all got in a fight with gary, and he hopped on a bus to costa rica. so soon it will just be peter and i. how weird is that. i'm really sad that erik is leaving. everyday i talk about him leaving a lot so that i can get used to the idea. i say things like, "when you get back you can wear nice clothes all the time." or like, "hey when you're in vermont it wont be hot all the time and any time you get hungry you can find something to eat. that will be awesome." the internet here is super, super slow and i'm having trouble uploading photos. so that's it for this post. love,
-jessie
p.s. i think my stupid fever is finally gone, and i'm back on the ciphro.
p.p.s. today when i was finding us a hotel, i left my bike with erik and peter, and when i came out they were talking to this guy about the trip, and then this women selling food on the side of the road started yelling at us, "he's a theif! he's going to steal your bike!" and the guy didn't even blink or anthing and peter and erik had no idea what the lady was saying because they don't speak much spanish, and i had to be like, "we have to go now." it really weirded me out.

San Lorenzo

so the other day i fell over. actually i think i have fallen over quite a bit as evidenced by all the other scars on my leg. i think between the scars, tan lines, and the fact that the tweezers i brought along for my eyebrows have made their way into my patch kit, that this trip is helping me to look super hot. the other day erik and i were biking along, and i was just super hungry. so we stopped in this little town to buy sodas and chips. we were definately the first gringos to ever go into this pueblo. the whole place like freaked out. when erik rode by, this baby literally burst into tears. he scard the baby because he looked so weird. no one in el salvador is as white as erik, and no one has a beard. first all these kids came out, then their older siblings, then the mom with the scared baby. it was totally crazy. i bet we had 15-20 people watching us eat chips and drink generic cola. they kept saying things like, "oh, the old guy doesn't understand anything." and eventually i was all, "look, he's not that old. he's only thirty. he just has a really big beard." i think erik is getting tired of people pointing and staring at him all the time. i still think it's funny when kids yell, "santa clause!" when he rides by. tonight we are in san lorenzo, honduras. i feel really bad. i have diarhea again, and i think i have a fever. my whole body is really achy. i keep taking ibuprophen and aleve, but i'm not feeling good at all. it's really hard for me to bike like this because all i want to do is be laying down and resting, and it´s so, so hot. like the kind of heat that makes you talk about swimming pools, and cold lakes, and fall weather. crazily enough, this is supposed to be the coolest time of year in central america. oh god, guess what else? there is totally algae growing inside my water bottles. i think the only time i ever cleaned them out was when i was home in CA. ok, hope everyone is good. miss you all bunches. love,
-jessie

san vicente

so, we got totally lost leaving san salvador, el salvador, and today we ended up on this tiney country road that circled this giant crater lake at the top of this extinct volcano. the road was awesome, and there was almost no traffic, but i think we were climbing forever. the last 4 kilometers were torture. it was super, super hot, we were hungry, and tired and the climb was just relentless. erik said we were going 3.5 miles per hour. we were hoping that once we got back up into the mountains it would be cool, like in guatemala, but it wasn't at all. the climb just totally zapped all of our energy. we ended up eating lunch at this place that was the el salvadorean equivalent of mac donalds, and i tried to eat a 1/2 burger, but it was way too much meat and i couldn't do it. this is a picture of erik at the end of the day in our hotel room.
and this is a picture of me from last night's hotel room. my mom wants more photos of me... i'm not totally sure how this happened (i'm going to blame it on crappy maps), but yesterday we accidentally got on the wrong freeway at the end of the day, while the sun was setting, and everyone we asked said there were no hotels for miles, and miles. we totally panicked and started biking really fast, and ended up at a "couples hotel". they had only one room available, and there was no running water. sometimes bike touring is awesome, and sometimes it's like desperate times, desperate measures. to flush the toilet, there was a garbage can full of water, and a bucket, and you just dumped water into the toilet bowl until it flushed. so we had all been using the toilet and not flushing, and peter goes into the bathroom, and we hear this scream, and he'd accidentally dropped his boxers in the toilet. he decided the best option was to rinse them out in the garbage can full of water, and hang them off of this protruding rebar coming off of the bathroom wall. then we got some pupusas to eat, and i drank a bunch of beer (i wasn't in a great mood due to being lost and the lack of running water). the pupusas were kinda messy, and i was a little drunk and washed my hands in the gargage can of water, and peter was like, "hey, you pretty much just washed your hands in my pee." not the best night. anyways, soon we'll be in honduras. it's cool flying through countries like this. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

Pacaya

don't read this one dad, pacaya has not gotten any safer since the last time i was here....
So there's an active volcano near antigua guatemala, and it's only like US $10 to go see it. last time i was here, 6 years ago, the volcano was not as active and you could climb all the way up to the crater, but now there's been a whole lot of lava and you can't get up there any morè. they pack up a bus load of tourists, and then the bus driver walks up to the volcano with you carrying this huge shot gun, which doubled as a walking stick. when you get up to the base of the volcano, everyone just sort of spread out and started climbing over the "cooled" lava flows to where the molten lava was flowing. the ground was super hot, and if you stuck a stick into the lava where we were walking, it would catch on fire. it was really crazy to be walking over all this stuff. the lava was super unstable, and just underneath the surface you could see red moltan lava.
by the lava flows there was a guide, and he said if we just hung out and waited the lava would reach where we were standing in a half hour. he said it was moving at a rate of 5 kilometers per hour. you didn't want to stand too close to the flows because of the heat. but i was close enough that i could hear the rocks cooling and tumbling down the side of the volcano. it sounded like a river, but made of stones instead of water. it started to get dark, and i was feeling a little scared because it was hard enough climbing over the lava when you could see were you were going. looking at glowing lava in the dark is pretty cool though. the clouds over the flows were pink colored, and it was just this wild contrast between the black cooled lava, the red molten lave, the dark blue sky, and the pink clouds of smoke and steam. we did end up getting down off the lava flows before the sun set, but we had like an hour climb down the side of the mountain in total darkness. we all looked super cool with our matching petzel head lamps. i think that if pacaya was in the US, probably you'd be allowed to climb up to the base and look at the lava, but there's no way that you'd be alowed to climb all over the flows.
this is a picture of antigua, guatemala. it used to be the capital of guatemala, but in 1777 (easy date to remember) there was a big earthquake that destroyed most of the town, so they moved the capital to guatemala city. antigua is really cool looking though. the streets are all coblestone, which sucks if you're on a bike, and all the buildings look like they could just as easily be in an old european city. all the doors are made of huge slabs of wood with these ornate knockers shaped like lions or womens' hands. it's cool just to walk around and check out the old buildings. this is probably like the worlds least attractive photo of our spanish teachers, but it's the only one i took. i invited them over for dinner last night becuase it was our last day of classes. Milli (my spanish teacher) is on the left, and then on the right is Ceci (erik's teacher), and next to her is Molli (peter´s teacher). the teachers said we were all bad students because we never did our homework, but i liked hanging out with them cuz they were funny and always telling mildy of color jokes. milli kept cracking up at me when we had class because all of my grammer examples were totally morbid. like we'd be learning about past participles, and my examples would be stuff like, "the dead dogs rotting along side the highway", or the "broken bicycle was fixed by me.", or "the sick cyclists are in the hotel". i think maybe i could be hired to write a dick and jane style spanish primer for the adams family if they ever wanted to learn spanish. i think we're leaving tomorrow. love,
-jessie

Antigua

we are in antigua guatemala hanging out for a week taking spanish classes. i'm not sure how much good it's doing us, but i think we all are really glad to have a week off. peter got really sick (from food), and erik spent the first couple days asleep. i went to make a phone call on halloween, and came back to the room at 6:00 and found both of them totally passed out. it was maybe like the lamest halloween of my whole life. i wandered around for a while, then came home, ate a bowl of cereal and read for a little bit. i was really bumbed out about it because halloween is my favorite holiday, but then it ended up the next day, dia de los muertos (day of the dead)was really awesome. i went to this pueblo with my spanish teacher and some of her friends, to see these kites made out of tissue paper called barriletes. this is a close up of one of them. the indigenous people make them, and a lot of the messages were really political. this one says "live in peace and protect the world", but a lot of them said things like "guatemala, you've hurt me so much. you've burned my land, killed my ancestors, but my culture survives." at the end of the day, they tried to fly the kites. a lot of the came crashing back down to the earth and were destroyed, but some of them flew. and it was so crazy. it just looked like these giant, ornate jelly fish flying through the air. on the strings the indigenous people put messages to the dead.
fifty seven percent of guatemalans are indigenous, and they are really, really different from the ladino (non-indigenous) people of guatemala. the indigenous people have really strong spiritual beliefs. for example you're not supposed to take pictures of them because they think you are robbing their sole. the women still wear traditional clothing, but most of the men use western clothes. during dia de los muertos, the indigenous cover the graves of their relatives with pine needles and flowers and hang out in the cemetary all day remembering their family members who haved passed away. it was really beautiful.
This is a picture of the "organ meat stew" i had for lunch. next to it, in the pot with the red rim, is iguana. the big black lumpy thing is beans. yum... i kinda wanted to try the iguana just so i could say i'd eaten iguana, but the organ meat stew was not sitting well in my stomach, so i had to pass that one up. love,
-jessie